Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?

Journal article

The number and quality of user reviews greatly affects consumer purchasing decisions. While reviews in all languages are increasing, it is still often the case (especially for non-English speakers) that there are only a few reviews in a person's first language. Using an online experiment, we examine the value that potential purchasers receive from interfaces showing additional reviews in a second language. The results paint a complicated picture with both positive and negative reactions to the inclusion of foreign-language reviews. Roughly 26--28\% of subjects clicked to see translations of the foreign-language content when given the opportunity, and those who did so were more likely to select the product with foreign-language reviews than those who did not.

Authors: Hale, S; Eleta, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Journal: CHI2017: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Pages: 4430-4442
• Publication date: 2017-05-02
• Acceptance date: 2017-01-06
• DOI: 10.1145/3025453.3025575
• ISBN: 9781450346559
• Keywords: user-generated content; internationalization and localization; experiment; bilingualism; product reviews; multilingualism; e-commerce